


but I swear I’d like to drink the fuel straight from your lighter

by buttface



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: 69 (Sex Position), Fuckbuddies, Identity, Lack of Communication, M/M, POV Second Person, POV Second Person - Drift, Possibly Unrequited Love, Self-Doubt, Sticky Sexual Interfacing, dubious robot anatomy, not telling your boss that you think he's a saint, questionable ethics in bed, they're trying, very trying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:41:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24372202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttface/pseuds/buttface
Summary: Sometimes love is more about you than it is about them, but that doesn't make it less important.Drift and Rodimus hooking up early in the Lost Light's journey, when relationships and identities are still tenuous.*You won’t tell him that you love him. Keeping secrets also comes naturally to you now. You will go through the motions of being a different person until it sticks, like learning step by step how to transform a new frame. You are light and optimism and faith in higher things now, remember? You left yearning behind millions of years ago. Even Deadlock didn’t do that.
Relationships: Drift | Deadlock/Rodimus | Rodimus Prime
Comments: 18
Kudos: 67





	but I swear I’d like to drink the fuel straight from your lighter

**Author's Note:**

> I just love second person POV, that's how it goes.
> 
> There is an extremely vague reference to Drift having been involved in less than safe, sane, and enthusiastically consensual situations pre joining the Autobots. You can interpret this as you choose, it isn't dwelt upon.
> 
> Everybody has good intentions and enjoys themselves, but there's a bit of roughhousing and miscommunication that leads to a tense moment. I intended for it to be pretty mild, but if that sounds uncomfortable to you, this might not be the fic for you and that's okay!
> 
> Immense thanks to James @towards_morning for reading this over and for generally being a great friend and shouting-about-robots companion.

He’s warm. Warm, warm lips. Warm hands that are never still, never satisfied. You love the way they play idly along your seams as you lie together, tracing the lines that define you. 

You love him. You love him, and he loves you, but he loves everyone. It comes naturally to him. He loves you for letting him take care of you and it’s not really what you wanted, but you’ll take it.

(It’s fine. You love easily now. That’s part of being Drift, you’ve decided. It doesn’t have to mean anything.)

You always love the ones that love everybody. The idea of someone who loves only you is not only absurd, but suspicious. How could you love someone that unwise? What you want is a crusade to lose yourself in, a savior to prostrate yourself before.

You won’t tell him that you love him. Keeping secrets also comes naturally to you now. You will go through the motions of being a different person until it sticks, like learning step by step how to transform a new frame. You are light and optimism and faith in higher things now, remember? You left _yearning_ behind millions of years ago. Even Deadlock didn’t do that.

You don’t know how much of Deadlock he sees when he looks at you. For all you know, that’s what he likes. You’re well aware that there are plenty of Autobots who secretly long to have Megatron's most deadly soldier between their legs; you’ve got the private messages to prove it. Maybe it’s just to be able to tell their friends they had you and survived, but some of them have shared some _very_ intricate fantasies. Guns are usually involved; gun safety and responsible maintenance habits are not.

You’re pretty careful about opening messages from strangers now.

That _is_ the sort of thing a notorious daredevil would do, right? But you’re pretty sure that’s not it, at least not from what you know about him. It’s usually the ones who hurl abuse at you in public that proposition you in private and he’s never been that type, not even when you hadn’t quite perfected being Drift again. But then, you both have plenty you’re not telling each other.

Anyway. If it means he keeps showing up at your door, heat pouring from his lines, you don’t really mind so much if you are just another asteroid for him to surf. 

“Driiiiiift,” he whines into your shoulder plating. You know he hides his optics on purpose so you can’t read them. And so you don’t know if he means “Drift, there’s still time to hook up before your shift starts” or “Drift, you aren’t paying enough attention to me” or “Drift, I wish I hadn’t let Prowl manipulate me into secretly keeping a dangerous criminal on board, you’re the only mass murdering Decepticon for me”. 

You don’t know why all three possibilities make you more fond of him.

“Yes, Captain?” you tease, and you swear you can feel the heat inside of him rising. He spreads a hand out across your chest, fingertips stretching questioningly over the edge of your chestplate. Ah, option one then.

“Call me that again,” he insists, propping himself up on an elbow so he can look at you. His spoiler is so wide that he has to lean over you a little to keep from bending it and old instincts have you tensing up, but looking at his apologetic grin makes it easy to spin your attack protocols back down again.

“Don’t you get enough of that all day?” you ask him, rubbing a thumb fondly along the edge of his spoiler. It's a ridiculously oversized piece of kibble, especially compared to the narrow curve of his waist, but it suits him somehow. He takes up a lot of space for a relatively small bot and that feels right.

“Not enough. Not from you.” 

You know Magnus has concerns about how you act towards Rodimus, but you don’t think he knows how you two spend your time off. If he did, he’d be even more scandalized by you. From what you can tell from the rumors you overhear, everybody _else_ thinks you spend any moment you’re alone fragging each other into stasis. So long as it keeps them from wondering what you’re _really_ doing in the basement, you don’t mind. You like their version much better.

What they don’t know is that you’ve never gotten him off. Not once. He won’t let you. 

Most times he comes to your quarters he just lies on your berth and watches you go through your sword kata, talking to you without expecting detailed replies. He wants to hear that Overlord is still contained, that his crew is safe. He tells you all the grand plans he has, the ones he’ll have changed for new, better plans next week.

And yes, sometimes he kisses you the moment the door is closed, warm and pliant, dropping to his knees as soon as you’ll let him. His glossa is hot and smooth and slick and he eats you out with the same enthusiasm he gives to everything.

But he never lets you return the favor. He deflects and distracts every time you try and his smile tends to short-circuit your processor so he always gets away with it. The most you can ever manage is having neither of you get off, and that just makes him disappointed. He clearly wants things this way, but you don’t know why.

You know a dozen ways you could kill him right now, but you don’t know how to make him happy. Millions of years and you still haven’t learned anything of use, not even for one bot.

“Rodimus,” you murmur, and you must have let something slip in your tone because he stops teasing and just _looks_ at you.

Your hand fits nicely between his cheek-piece and the more flexible metal of his face. He leans in to grant you a kiss but you just hold him there, running your thumb over his cheek, forcing him to wait and be seen.

“Captain,” you add, and he shutters his optics like he’s waiting for the joke. You don’t give him that either. You don’t really know from captains, you haven’t had many that you haven’t tried to kill at one time or another; but you trust him, and not just because you know he’s important. You’ve seen what happens when an appealing idea takes precedence over individual lives, and you trust him not to go that way. That's all you ask for. You can do the dirty work.

He leans into your hand, just a little. You know he hates to hold still like this, but someone has to teach him. He needs to rest. The ship is basically held together by the sheer force of his charisma and self-confidence, but you know how fragile those things can be, if only from the outside.

You kiss him, finally, savoring how soft the metal of his mouth is under his natural heat, how yours starts to mold against it as well. He takes this as a signal to put his hands back on your seams and you don’t mind at all.

You let him warm you up and get you nicely charged for a little while, but you’re feeling too full of affection to let him just overload you and walk away as if he felt nothing. Not this time, not without at least trying. 

(You don’t know which part bothers you more: that you don’t get to make him feel good, that you don’t get to be the kind of person that could make him feel good, or that he doesn’t seem to need you enough to have any regrets.)

He’s leaning over you still, but you can work a knee in between his legs enough to get his attention. He reaches up to caress your chest again, trace the insignia, but you catch his hand and bring it to your mouth. You make sure he’s looking at you before you take two of his fingers into your mouth, disengaging your intake control so you can take him in further. Your fangs scrape gently against the still-fresh paint.

You see the desire in his optics, brighter than you’ve ever seen it, but not bright enough before anxiety swirls up and darkens it. He laughs a little and you work the flexible tubing of your intake to suck him in deeper. “Hey, careful, you don’t know where those have been. Don’t you want to know where they’ll be next instead?”

You run your glossa up the underside of his fingers, careful to press where the sensors are closest to the surface.

He slowly pulls his hand out of your mouth. “C’mon, Drift, we don’t have long until shift change, lemme overload you--” as if he hasn’t noticed your knee nudging his panel, your glossa making suggestions you could very easily keep if he’d only let you, all the times you’ve tried and he won’t even acknowledge that you’ve offered, and you just

cannot

take it.

If he wants you to stop then he can tell you as much. He can level with you about why he doesn’t want you, why you’re good enough for him to take care of but not to lower his guard around. Maybe he’s not even wrong to make that judgment, almost certainly, but you’re _trying_ , you’re trying so hard.

You push him over onto his back. His reflexes are quick, but he hasn’t trained in close combat. (You should teach him, after.) It’s so easy to pin him down with you kneeling above him, knees spread out on his spoiler wings to keep him from moving. 

A dozen ancient interrogation routines fire, and before you can stop yourself you’re pointing the gun you aren’t holding, haven’t held in years, right at his face.

Calm. You need to be calm. Put your empty hand down. You aren’t _him_ anymore, this isn’t a recon mission, this is just you, Drift, _Drift_ , trying to be good and trusted and loving and failing every step of the way and you don’t understand _why_.

“Rodimus.” That’s good. That’s Drift’s voice you’re doing. You don’t want to scare him, not _him_. You’re trying to be careful of that. But you desperately need him to _listen_ , to take you seriously, and you still don’t know how to make that happen as Drift.

He stares at you for a moment in silence. You can see shades of fear in his optics, about the tone you would expect from autorun self-defense routines that haven’t been dismissed yet, but it’s almost completely layered over with other things, mostly confusion. You should get up, you should _give_ up, but if you can’t learn how to make him happy, who else will let you try? “... Yeah? Drift?”

“Rodimus, I promise I’m not going to do anything to you that you don’t want. I would never do anything to hurt you, I’m not that kind of person --” not anymore, anyway, not as Drift “-- but please, can you at least tell me why you won’t let me get you off?” You don’t know if you _want_ to hear the answer, not from the one person you’ve so far been able to believe maybe trusted you, but you need to know. Whatever this thing is between you, you need to know whether the beams under your feet are solid.

He continues to stare at you in silence, but his optics are shifting towards more solid confusion. That’s … good? You think?

“I can’t really give you any references --” because you’ve since killed pretty much everyone you’ve fragged, or some other Autobot has, but it’d ruin the mood to have him start dwelling on that as much as you do “-- but I think I’m pretty good at it, if you’re worried about that, and I can learn if I’m not --”

“Drift, settle down, will you?”

He’s grinning more than anyone with their body parts pinned to the berth by a known mass murderer should. Not that you’ve never seen that reaction before, but not usually on someone you intended to let survive very long. (Which you do intend! Because you _protect_ people now, not murder them! Unless you really have to. But not this one, never this one. Everything will be fine.)

“You’re my third in command, right? So you’re my direct report -- I guess? I don’t really know how this works, Mags tried to show me some flowcharts but the details didn’t really seem important -- anyway, that’s not the point. The point is it’d be abuse of power, yeah?”

Now it’s your turn to stare blankly at him.

“And I don’t want to be that kind of captain, all right? I mean like -- it’s probably good for both of us to have a bit of an outlet, we know how these things go, so I figured it’s okay if we mess around a bit, but I’m not going to take advantage of you --”

You shouldn’t laugh. It isn’t funny, it’s admirable. This is the kind of thing that makes you sure that your vision was right, even when the thing in the basement tests your faith. But you can’t help it. So many conversational projections you have to hastily shut down and garbage collect because this is not where you thought this was going; the context switching leaves your processor spinning and it comes out as a giggle.

“Stop laughing at me! I’m being responsible!”

“You are, you are,” but your vents are hitching with meaningless laughter all the same. “I’m sorry. _Captain_ , I’m sorry. But you were afraid of taking advantage? Of _me_?”

“I _am_ your superior officer, you know.”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But … How can I put this. First of all, you’re definitely the most equitable fuck I’ve ever had.”

He doesn’t ask for any details, and you’d rather not give them. That was all someone else’s life, anyway. Someones else.

“And second of all. Remember what I was doing when Kup recruited me? How I was attempting to kill my ex-captain? Who I’d previously led an uprising against?” Not that you’d gotten very far leading an uprising with nobody following; you learned far too late why charisma and relationships are so important. But it’s the principle of the thing. “I think I’ve adequately demonstrated a lack of respect for the chain of command.”

The fear in his optics doesn’t intensify, despite you alluding rather directly to the possibility of trying to kill him. You shaded it with genuine amusement, of course, but it was a hypothetical you hadn’t been planning to bring up at all. You wouldn’t have to do that with him. He must know that.

(Anyway, the universe needs him, not you. You don’t need to tell him that right now, though.)

He seems insulted. “I’m serious! I’m trying to do this right.”

“I know, I know. I appreciate it, honest.” You try to modulate soothing undertones into your voice. “You _are_ a good captain. I promise I’m not here because I think you’re ordering me to be. You just caught me by surprise. It never occurred to me that someone might worry about Deadlock’s feelings.”

“But you _aren’t_ Deadlock, you’re Drift.”

You don’t know why he believes you about that. You wonder sometimes if he’d feel otherwise if he’d met you before. At least you don’t think he did. You weren’t always paying attention to anyone who wasn’t on the other side of your gun scope. And he can’t have been one of your former targets, because he’s here now, alive.

You don’t know why Primus sent you to him, but you’re thankful.

“Yes. That’s right, I’m Drift.”

You lean down and press a light kiss to the corner of his mouth, trying to express your gratitude. You aren’t willing to let him up just yet; this isn’t the moment you were expecting, but you want to stay in it just a little bit longer.

“Just let me be kind to you, all right? I haven’t had much opportunity to practice. You’d be doing me a favor.”

He thinks this through for a moment, which you spend trying not to fidget with his chest kibble. “Okay,” he says eventually, with only a light tint of anxiety and embarrassment left. You’ll keep an eye on that. There’s a base note of enthusiasm, at least, you’re sure of it. “But at least let me get you off too. Can’t let you have all the fun.”

“All right. That’s an order I can follow.”

You could follow more than that, if he wanted. You hadn’t thought of it that way precisely before, but you like it. Let him take the reins, let yourself be carried along by the force of his personality for a while. Probably best not to explore this right after he told you he’s uncomfortable with it, though. You can work your way up to that.

“How do you want to do this?”

“Hmm.” You really want to get him in your mouth, is the thing, but that’s not quite what he asked for. “Wait there a moment.”

He wants something equitable. You don’t have a clue how to do that; it’s not something that was a big part of Con ‘facing discourse, inasmuch as there was any. But maybe there’s a way you can both focus on each other at the same time.

You scoot back off his spoiler, giving each side a gentle kiss by way of apology. He shivers a little; it’s performative, but you appreciate the performance.

You lie down on your side with your array near his head and your head close to his hips. When you bend one knee, your legs form a sizable triangle with your valve at the apex. “Try rolling onto your side and rest your shoulder stack on my thigh.”

There. You can’t entirely see him, but you can feel him venting onto your array even without getting your valve out. You _can_ see well enough to be sure he’s far enough up that his spoiler doesn’t have to bend; you’ve given those sensitive parts enough abuse for one shift. Maybe another time you can do it on purpose, if he likes.

You transform your valve panel away and appreciate the pleased noise you get in response. You leave your spike in; it’s not a good angle, and besides, while he’ll happily suck spike, you know he’s got a soft spot for eating valve. You’re more than willing to let him focus on his talents. 

“Not yet,” you tell him when he moves in to touch you. “Let me see yours.”

You nuzzle at his panel and are rewarded at last with the sound of his spike pressurizing. It’s everything you’ve dreamed of, thick and rippled, gleaming red with yellow piping and matrix-blue biolights. Practically a holy icon. And at last you get to worship at it. 

You run a finger up its length and enjoy the shiver you feel through his whole body against yours.

“Now can I?” you hear from between your thighs.

“Of course, capta- _ooooohhh_ ,” you trail off into a surprised moan as he plunges his entire glossa into your valve.

That’s right. You’ve got to work hard if you want to keep up with him.

You lick up along his spike, savoring the texture of it; at least you’re trying to, but it’s hard to focus when he’s spreading your valve apart with his fingers and lapping up your lubricant from the space between them. His fingers run even hotter than the rest of him; you think he does it on purpose, to make sure you can feel the contrast against your calipers.

You didn’t want to rush this, but you’re going to have to convince him of the benefits of your mouth quickly before he gets too distracted.

His spike is slightly too long for your oral cavity in its normal configuration, but you’ve already loosened your connections for his fingers so your intake can easily expand to take him in. The tip of his spike penetrates your intake tube and keeps - going -- in --- until your face touches the hot metal of his pubic plate; you hear him hissing with pleasure at the same time you feel it, the turbulent air that forms the sibilant sound _ssssss_ ing across your anterior node.

You make a pleased noise and he thrusts much too gently into your mouth.

Primus. What a spike. Maybe next time you can convince him to fuck your mouth, really get some use out of you. “Next time” might be too optimistic, but you need him to understand that you _want_ to be useful. If there’s an advantage to be had, then let him take it. You’d happily beg him for it if that’ll convince him.

It’s fine. You’ve got time to keep trying. Cyberutopia is a long way away, and you’re not going anywhere.

You regret not being able to see his optics as he realizes how much you love this. But this position does at least mean you don’t have to focus so much on conveying your own appreciation by voice, since you have your mouth very full. 

You let your frame speak for you, moving softly against him, trying to match his rhythm. He moves in you and you move around him, mostly in unison; when one of you stutters a little from some particularly clever flick of a glossa or twist of a finger, the other laughs, as best you can with a busy mouth. You feel stretched out against him, trying to push back against his fingers at the same time you eagerly take in his spike; you love it, you wish he could see it, you wish you could show him how far you’d prostrate yourself for him. _Another time, another time_ , you promise yourself.

There’s still more you can do to make him happy now, though.

His frame curves in enough at the waist that you can slide an arm underneath and around to reach his valve, which he obligingly opens up for you when you tap on it. He wriggles appreciatively when you run your finger around the rim, moving his spike around in your mouth, and you take that as encouragement to push two fingers in, gently thrusting in harmonic pace with your movements on his spike.

He takes his mouth off you for a moment, long enough to moan without the muffling effect of your valve. You’ve done well. He reflexively starts to squeeze his legs together, chasing the feeling but also obstructing your access, so you take one leg in your free hand and pull him gently open for you, stroking along his seams.

it feels good to move along with him. You’ve spent a while now fighting side by side, you know each other’s body language, but this is more than that; you can _feel_ the thrumming of his body, the signals firing just before his back curves. When you hear and feel a muffled noise from his mouth in the lining of your valve, you know you’re doing something right. 

You’d love to take your time, but there will be other chances, and it’s hard to keep yourself calm when you can feel the circuit of charge leaping from your valve to roddy’s mouth humming through his body and out along his spike into your mouth, thrumming down the length of your spinal strut. Your fingers tingle and tremble with his charge.

You lose the battle of endurance first. It’s still too much for you, between the digits he’s filling you with and his mouth sucking at your node and his spike swelling in your intake and charge running haphazardly around and around through you both. You don’t take your mouth off of him, not even to scream his name, but you know he knows from the shape your mouth makes on his spike and the grip of your calipers on his fingers and the crackling along your frame.

He pulls out of you when you finish clenching, but you hook your legs against his shoulders to keep him from repositioning too far. He has to be close now, you don’t want him distracted, you don’t want _you_ distracted. Let him lay his head down and feel your body moving for him. Let him cry out for you from between your legs.

Here he is, the matrix-bearer, the flame in dark places, the light found, the holy spark, Primus, please, _please_ , you want to be able to swallow him down and carry his glow inside you. You want to be the one by his side, you want to be the body he buries himself in, you want to be what he needs. You move your mouth faster, faster, your fingers forgotten except to fill him up. You know you’ve overloaded already but it only makes you want more, more of him. You hear his voice clearly now, nonsense noises, begging you.

“Drift!!”

He’s perfect, perfect, _perfect_. All the fears and frustrations are forgotten, washed away by the taste of him overloading in your eager mouth, charge crackling up your slick fingers and prickling your fangs. You swallow him down, feeling the hot fluid trickling into your tank. You don’t want to waste a drop.

Eventually he stops trembling and you come back to yourself a little, enough that you can sit up and climb back to lie beside him normally again. You hide your face against his back, unsure what he’d see on it if he could.

“Not so bad, was it?” you ask hopefully.

“Fraaaaaag,” he mumbles into the berth. You’ll take that as a yes.

You lie there in silence together, dismissing the alerts from your chronometer. He looks so peaceful. You brought him peace. _You_ , Drift, Drift who he doesn’t think of as Deadlock. You don’t want to ruin this moment for either of you.

Eventually you hear his vocalizer reluctantly spinning up. You think he’s about to remind you that you’re supposed to be on duty now, but instead he asks “Do you miss Cybertron?”

Frag it. You’re not in a hurry to leave this berth and go back to being Formerly-Deadlock. “No. Never had anything to miss.”

“Yeah.” 

“When we find Cyberutopia. That’ll be somewhere worth staying.”

He laughs half-heartedly. “Are you sure of that, or do you just feel like you’re supposed to be sure?”

It’s the sort of thing you expect from Rung, not from him. Not that you’ve actually ever had a session with Rung. You spend enough time thinking about who you are and what you’ve done; you don’t need anyone’s help with that.

It’s all right. You already know how this story ends. You know he saves everyone. Surely you’ll be there with him, otherwise why give the vision to you? By then you’ll know how to be the person you want to be. You’ll deserve the grace you’ve been given. You’ll understand what the point of everything you’ve done was.

“We’ll find out when we get there.”

**Author's Note:**

> You ever think far too hard about what Cybertronians would call 69ing considering they don't use Arabic numerals? Drift has no idea what they call it anyway, because as far as he's concerned he's just invented it. Nobody tell him otherwise.
> 
> Everybody involved in this has a terrible understanding of the ethics of fraternizing with your yes-man subordinate / divinely prophesied savior and no idea how to just have a conversation. In the grand scheme of things it's among the less bad decisions that either of them have made, but please don't take it to mean that I don't think these concerns are important irl. These two are just awful at negotiating it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] but I swear I'd like to drink the fuel straight from your lighter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27681083) by [carboncopies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/carboncopies/pseuds/carboncopies)




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